Today’s smartphones are coming with very complex operating systems, much closer to those for computers than the ordinary interfaces we had a few years ago on the first cell phones. Although there are several mobile operating systems, only two of them are really prevalent today – Google’s Android and Apple’s iOS.
Now, in terms of applications, the two companies are in competition, the iOS leading with nearly 600,000 apps currently available for download, while Google’s Android has about 450,000. In addition, the iOS apps are more professionally made because they are passing through more quality filters than those seen in the Android Market. However, plenty of high quality iPhone apps can be found on websites dedicated to Android, many of them being free, while the number of free Android apps is decreasing significantly.
On the other hand, it seems that both operating systems have the same problems when it comes to application security, at least after what happened in the last few days. Although the latest studies have shown that the applications running on the platform developed by Apple stop working more times than those running on Android, the situation is quite balanced.
According to statistics conducted between 1st and 15th of December, 2011, analyzing 23 iOS and 33 Android versions, the “winner” was iOS 5.01 – the most recent version launched by Apple. Those who have performed the tests said that, in their opinion, once Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich will become as spread as the iOS 5.01, the number of crashed apps will increase on Android. And they seem to be right.
Few days ago, the journalists from a well-known publication have brought again into discussion the problem of the access granted to the iOS apps. They said that any application that asks us permission to retrieve the data on our location can also take all the pictures/videos stored by the devices. The problem is old and it brings up only the cases in which developers would really want to steal photo libraries of the devices because the iOS allows them to do this without us knowing. Basically, using information about location and photos from the library, any bad intended developer could make a map of places where you have been and the things you have seen.
Even if this would sound like an attempt to put the Cupertino company in a bad light, recently, the same publication made the demonstration to prove that they are impartial, testing the rival Android OS for the same problem. The result seemed to be identical, the problem manifesting in the same way, which confirms the statistics mentioned above.
Of course both Google and Apple will definitely update their operating systems to solve the problems, but it remains to be seen who would win the battle and how would it affect the consumer market!